Why Are Religious Services Unintelligible?

(4) The Church will expect you to attend at least one of its services regularly, every Sunday, and with very, very few exceptions these are universally abominable. In the first place they consist almost exclusively of talk. We tell God what to do and what not to do, and give him information about things which, if he is omniscient, he already knows. We attempt to celebrate his glory with doggerels and religious nursery rhymes called hymns, mostly set to military or sentimental tunes. And then the minister, speaking on God’s behalf, thinks up ear-catching ways of spinning out platitudes concerning the avoidance of evil and the cultivation of goodness. The Roman Catholic Church recently made the serious mistake of having the Mass celebrated everywhere in the vernacular, so that it could be “understood,” and added insult to injury by having some person standing with a microphone beside the altar to “explain” what was going on, thereby depriving Christendom of the last widespread stronghold of mystery. To find it any more you have to go to such joyous places as the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Paris, where there are no pews, and the rite is celebrated in Old Slavonic, which nobody understands. It was the same with the medieval Latin of the Roman Church. Even if you knew Latin quite well, it was so chanted or mumbled as to be perfectly unintelligible.

Why should a religious service be unintelligible? Because its function is, to quote Keats, “to tease us out of thought, as doth eternity.” For many people the contemplation of God, of the Ground of Being, is most easily reached through the contemplation of pure sound, which is why Hindus and Buddhists hum very slowly such virtually meaningless mantras as OM AH HUM. Christians could just as well use AMEN, IESUS, ADONAI, ALLELUIA, or KYRIE ELEISON. To contemplate through sound in this way, you must simply be absorbed in the sound itself and forget all about anything it is supposed to mean, for when words are used for their meaning they become abstract signs and symbols, pointing to something other than themselves, and one step removed from reality. Services therefore should be focused on meditation and contemplation, still using chanting and appropriate music, though I feel the organ has such maudlin associations attached to it that it has had its day.